Bobby Fischer, the chess genius and super-self-hating-Jew, is such a ranter that it might seem sensible to have brushed aside his long-ago charges that Soviet chess players used to collude to ensure a Soviet champion in international chess competitions. But the economists Charles Moul and John Nye, both of Washington University in St. Louis, argue convincingly that the Soviets did . . .
A lot of my friends play chess, some of them very well. I’ve never taken to it. (I’m not even a very good backgammon player, Levitt’s claims notwithstanding.) But I was totally smitten by a new book about chess called The Immortal Game. It was written by David Shenk, a guy I know via e-mail and maybe a party or . . .
The World Cup final was both predictable (Italy’s comeback and eventual triumph after the early French goal) and bizarre (Zinedine Zidane’s farewell head-butt). Not a great game but not bad. The consolation match on Saturday, between Germany and Portugal, wasn’t much more exciting — except for the hometown German fans, who saw their young team secure third place in the . . .
We have a new “Freakonomics” column out in the current New York Times Magazine. (For a year, we wrote the column once a month), but we’ve just scaled back to once every two months.) This one is about organ transplants — specifically, how the huge success of transplantation in recent decades has created a surge in demand for donated organs, . . .
A lot of people have been worried lately that MySpace has become a playground for sexual predators. And a lot of these worried people blame the technology itself for affording sexual predators an opportunity they might not otherwise have. As is often the case with a new, scary technology, an even newer version of that technology turns out to be . . .
A quick cruise through this morning’s Wall Street Journal and New York Times yielded a few remarkably interesting articles: 1. The Journal‘s Jonathan Eig reports on a poverty program in Chicago that uses an incentive program to give low-income people the chance to earn rewards like high-income people who rack up frequent-flier miles or bank points. “For the past year,” . . .
According to CipherTrust, a company that makes its money protecting computers from viruses and spam, all the phishing attacks in the world are issued by a mere five “zombie” networks. Even more interesting is the fact that their targets are just as concentrated. Here, from CipherTrust’s page of spam statistics, are the top 5 targets and the percentage of phishing . . .
No one has ever accused any publisher of making too-subtle a book jacket for Freakonomics. For those of you not keeping score at home, here is the Norwegian cover, e.g., and here is the U.K. paperback. But it seems that the good folks at ValeNovak publishing in the Republic of Slovenia may win the prize: While we’re sharing pictures, here’s . . .
The Sports Illustrated jinx is famous: all too often, as soon as an athlete appears on the cover of SI, said athlete loses the big game or hits a streak of very bad luck. The Jinx got so famous, in fact, that SI itself once ran a cover story on the Jinx. The piece was written by Alexander Wolff, who . . .
What’s that, you say? A strong nose of utility, a nice sharp yield curve, and a racy finish with just a touch of … is it, is it — yes: understated liquidity. The newly founded American Association of Wine Economists has a 5-member board of directors (I’m disappointed and surprised to not find Richard Thaler among them) and an academic . . .
We’ve posted before on the subjects of randomness and luck. Along those lines, there’s a fascinating article by Jim Yardley in today’s N.Y. Times about the Chinese appetite for lucky numbers — well, for 8’s, the luckiest of all numbers — and how the government now auctions off lucky license plates for thousands of dollars. It used to be that . . .
There is so much noise these days about obesity that it can be hard to figure out what’s important about the issue and what’s not. To try to keep track, I sometimes divide the obesity issue into three questions. 1. Why has the U.S. obesity rate risen so much? Many, many answers to this question have been offered, most of . . .
Warren Buffett has been in the news twice recently: yesterday for having announced he’s giving $31 billion to Bill Gates’s foundation, and several weeks ago for buying an Israeli tool company. The Israeli stock market surged on the news that the Oracle of Omaha had bought one of their own companies — a welcome vote of confidence in a remarkable . . .
A few years ago, Germany legalized prostitution. It wasn’t hard to surmise that this was meant to make Germany a bit more hospitable for all the World Cup fans who have been visiting this month. Indeed, brothels across the country staffed up and prepared for the boom — which, apparently, hasn’t happened at all. It may well be that enough . . .
Nothing, except for the fact that I’m going to write about both of them here. A couple weeks ago, I posted about Thomas Robinson, an accounting professor at the University of Miami who, through ancestral DNA testing, had been deemed the first American to be able to genetically claim to be a descendant of Genghis Khan. Well, it turns out . . .
Several months ago, we proposed a plan to rid city streets of dog poop. It should be said that no one has acted on our plan — which used the poop itself, or rather the DNA contained therein, to solve the problem. Now it turns out that scientists using DNA profiling of panda poop have discovered a very encouraging fact: . . .
It’s a known affliction, especially once summertime hits: the dad or mom at the beach, with the kids in tow, struggling to read the BlackBerry screen in the glare of that damn sun, then tapping out a reply with sandy thumbs. No wonder they call it a CrackBerry. According to Joe Sharkey in today’s New York Times (it’s just a . . .
Sure seemed that way. He took a really hard crash into the wall today in the Pocono 500 when his brakes failed, but he walked away from it. In an interview soon after the crash, even Gordon sounded surprised by the fact that he wasn’t badly hurt, or even killed. “That was one of the hardest hits I have ever . . .
About four percent of the value of your home. That’s what the economists Leigh Linden and Jonah Rockoff (both of Columbia University) concluded in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper called “There Goes the Neighborhood? Estimates of the Impact of Crime Risk on Property Values From Megan’s Law.” Here’s how the NBER Digest summarizes their findings: They combine . . .
That’s the question answered here in an e-mail we just received from the very lovely and hard-working man who translated our book into Japanese: Gentlemen, This is Mamoru Mochizuki, your translator for the Japanese edition. About a month passed since the Japanese edition of Freakonomics was published. I would like to report how Japanese people reacted to the book, especially . . .
Actually, two examples in today’s New York Times*, and in the Arts section of all places. 1. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt solve a big problem — the illicit distribution of photos of their new baby — by distributing the pictures themselves and donating the proceeds to charity, thereby thwarting the paparazzi free market and potentially setting a new model . . .
A couple weeks ago, a member of suburban Chicago’s high-school district 214 asked that Freakonomics, along with several other books, be removed from a list of required summer reading. In the end, none of the books were removed — and since District 214 students are free to read Freakonomics, we offered to send free signed copies to the first 50 . . .
This weekend, Freakonomics received its 1,000th customer review on Amazon.com. Is this at all noteworthy? Some of you may recall that we have previously posted here about Amazon reviews. Levitt wondered why people bother to write reviews at all. I wrote about one particular reviewer who somehow managed to always float his review to the top of the heap. (That . . .
Last week, I posted here about how a member of the school board in suburban Chicago’s District 214 wanted to have several books removed from the schools’ reading list. Among them was Freakonomics. The board member, Leslie Pinney, objected to the various books for various reasons, including pornography, vulgarity, and in the case of Freakonomics, the argument that legalized abortion . . .
Have them play the National Economics Challenge, which sounds like Quiz Bowl with yield curves. Whatever you do, don’t send them to Times Square, where only 4 of 10 people on the street know who Steve Levitt is, but 8 of 10 know Jessica Simpson. (Honestly, I’d be shocked if as many as 4 of 10 random Americans could i.d. . . .
That’s the question sent our way by a reader (who happens to work for the Federal Trade Commission). To be exact, here’s what he wrote: Why don’t media companies act more like sports teams in trading assets? Why don’t we ever something like this: FOX trades Arrested Development to ABC for Alias and a pilot to be named in the . . .
There aren’t enough people like John Stossel on television: smart, curious, cantankerous, and very willing to shoot at sacred cows. I say this not because Stossel hosted the recent hour-long 20/20 program on Freakonomics, but because I’ve always admired his reporting and especially his attitude. His recent 20/20 special on education, “Stupid in America,” is a particularly good example. A . . .
That’s the question I’m asking myself today. I’ve spent the past couple of days in Washington D.C. for Book Expo America. My five-year-old son is a football fanatic, so whenever I’m in a town with an N.F.L. team, I try to bring home a souvenir for him. Today, I went to a huge souvenir store in D.C., with thousands of . . .
It has been said many times that awards are meaningless — unless you happen to win one. I guess that’s true. When we heard not long ago that the Webby Award for Best Copy/Writing on a website was not awarded to Freakonomics.com (yeah yeah yeah, we were happy just to be nominated) but to some hack outfit called TheNewYorker.com, I . . .
There’s a fascinating article by Nicholas Wade in today’s New York Times about a new understanding of human evolution — i.e., that “the split between the human and chimpanzee lineages … may have occurred millions of years later than fossil bones suggest.” Furthermore, “A new comparison of the human and chimp genomes suggests that after the two lineages separated, they . . .
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